Within Walking Distance
May. 9th, 2023 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerFollowing recommendations, I went back to the lube-and-tire shop where I’d just had my all-season tires installed on my car so that the wheel nuts could be re-torqued. As I was waiting for the technician to head out with his torque wrench, I looked in the windows of the cell phone repair shop in the same parking lot. Having had the battery in my iPhone replaced recently at a different shop, I might not have been expecting to see much. What I did notice got my attention.
An old browned-beige computer was sitting on the table in the middle of the store. Able to recognize a certain amount of old models, I knew I was looking at an Apple III, not II. All the tales of that business-aimed computer’s infamy and just who was (or wasn’t) to blame for it popped into my head, but the sense that it hadn’t sold a lot of units (the book Apple Confidential 2.0 suggests 75,000 sold with its original name badge) had me thinking it was something to see one outside of a “computer museum,” and so close to my own place too. Once my tires were taken care of I went into the cell phone repair shop, where I noted that while the computer had a different monitor set atop its case than Apple’s own “Monitor III,” it did have the add-on second floppy disk drive beside it. A person in the shop explained it still worked, although it wasn’t switched on at the time.
I’d already noticed signs the shop would repair much more modern Apple computers in addition to cell phones, so it made a certain sense this old machine was there to attract attention. At the same time, I did get to the point of recalling there’d been plenty of other computer models around when the Apple III had been for sale, and certain number of complaints about “survivors influencing the history books.”
An old browned-beige computer was sitting on the table in the middle of the store. Able to recognize a certain amount of old models, I knew I was looking at an Apple III, not II. All the tales of that business-aimed computer’s infamy and just who was (or wasn’t) to blame for it popped into my head, but the sense that it hadn’t sold a lot of units (the book Apple Confidential 2.0 suggests 75,000 sold with its original name badge) had me thinking it was something to see one outside of a “computer museum,” and so close to my own place too. Once my tires were taken care of I went into the cell phone repair shop, where I noted that while the computer had a different monitor set atop its case than Apple’s own “Monitor III,” it did have the add-on second floppy disk drive beside it. A person in the shop explained it still worked, although it wasn’t switched on at the time.
I’d already noticed signs the shop would repair much more modern Apple computers in addition to cell phones, so it made a certain sense this old machine was there to attract attention. At the same time, I did get to the point of recalling there’d been plenty of other computer models around when the Apple III had been for sale, and certain number of complaints about “survivors influencing the history books.”